Politics and Culture

May 24, 2017

Vulgar analysis

Does the reaction to the Manchester bombing show a change from the usual claptrap? Terry Glavin thinks so:

At the time of the London bombings, Jeremy Corbyn, then just a boring, offside Labour MP, joined with London Mayor Ken Livingstone (recently suspended from the Labur Party for his dalliances with anti-Semitism) and the disgraced former Labour MP George Galloway (a fancier of Syrian genocidaire Bashar Assad and a Hezbollah enthusiast) in blaming the London attack on Western foreign policy.

Corbyn is now the leader of a bitterly divided and vastly diminished Labour Party that is expected to be trounced by Prime Minister Theresa May in the June 8 parliamentary elections. You won’t hear Corbyn blaming the wicked former U.S. president George W. Bush for Monday night’s outrage in Manchester. It would be suicidal. Things have changed.

The Manchester massacre occurred four years to the day after Lee Rigby of the Royal Regiment of Fusiliers was butchered by “lone wolf” jihadists in the streets of Woolwich. Rigby’s throat was opened with a crude knife and he was nearly decapitated, with a meat cleaver. As recently as 2013, it was still fashionable to utter imbecilities lightening such murderers’ burden of guilt by resort to the “blowback” defence.

At the time, the famous American fantasist/documentarian Michael Moore declared that Rigby’s slaughter was understandable, because Westerners “kill people in other countries.”

This sort of vulgar “analysis” has been largely excised from respectable conversation and appears now to be confined to the sewers of public debate, where it belongs. On Tuesday, the Kremlin propaganda channel RT News found some “experts” who took up the line. So did the viciously homophobic and anti-Semitic British Hizb ut-Tahrir group, which is about as popular among British Muslims as Galloway is among Britain’s Labour Party MPs....

Another stupidity that was once considered a clever response to jihadist terror in “dar al-harb” was to point out that more North Americans (or Europeans) die from falling in their bathtubs than by getting killed by terrorists. It’s probably true. But bathtubs have not happily slaughtered tens of thousands of innocent Muslims in recent years, and bathtubs have not deliberately murdered more than 400 people in horrific attacks in Europe since 2015.

The scores of hideous mass murder plots successfully foiled by European authorities over the past two years were not being plotted by bathtubs. Britain’s MI5 is currently monitoring 3,000 extremely dangerous jihad hobbyists. French intelligence agencies are trying to keep tabs on about 15,000.

The people of Manchester are not unfamiliar with the horrible implications of “radicalization” among young Muslim men. The Muslim leadership in that city has been acutely concerned with the implications of jihadist recruitment and grooming for some long while.

Throughout Europe and North America, we seem to be finally shedding a lot of sappy platitudes and bigoted hysteria about the problem. Manchester is showing us how it’s done.

Hmmm. The Times (I think) ran a big cartoon feature portraying the bomber(s) as coward(s). Politicians still fall back on the same accusation. They may be psychopaths, mentally disturbed, losers, very stupid and ignorant, sadists, but they are not cowards.

They kill themselves. They believe they will go to paradise. This is what their religion teaches. If you die in killing the enemies of Allah you are blessed with heavenly rewards for eternity.

There is something wrong with their religion. We need to spell that out!